Connectivity (including wireless connection to the Internet and remote clients) has been contemplated for household appliances for some time. The term “Internet of Things” (IoT) has come to represent the idea that household articles of all kinds can be connected to the public Internet. Once connected, such articles can report various data to server and client devices. For example, ‘smart’ light bulbs may be connected to a household WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network). Each light bulb may have a microprocessor, memory, some means of detecting or interpreting status, power, and a wireless connection. Using these components, the light bulb can report its status, can be polled, etc.
The concept of IoT may be considered distinct from household connectivity in general (for example, connected computers, cable boxes, media devices, and the like) in that the IoT devices may not typically include sufficient computing resources or communications to meaningfully connect to the public internet. A conventional refrigerator would not connect to the internet; the same device as an IoT device would include computational, sensor, and communications hardware and sufficient software to become an entity addressable remotely and locally; the expectation being that this Internet Fridge could report its various states (power consumption or the like) and respond to remote commands (increase or decrease internal temperature).
Household mobile robots may also become IoT devices. In some ways, household mobile robots may be considered a distinct species within this set. In particular, the autonomy of the household mobile robot may set it apart from other appliances, which do not perform in unpredictable and variable environment conditions or make autonomous decisions based on tens or hundreds of sensor inputs in order to achieve mission completion. For example, a dishwasher—even an IoT dishwasher—does not know anything about its contents and runs the equivalent of simple scripts controlling motors and pumps, potentially interrupted by simple clog or other sensors. In contrast, a vacuuming robot (such as an iRobot® Roomba® robot) may detect its own state in numerous ways during the course of its mission, and may flexibly escape from challenging situations in the household, as well as engage in predictive and planning activities. As such, there may be challenges in integrating the autonomous behavior of a household mobile robot with IoT connectivity.